Hacker News Reader

Comment by jvandonsel | Hacker News Reader

If you had offered someone in 1916 a device that they could put in their pocket that would let them instantly communicate with nearly anyone on the planet, tap into a large fraction of the world's knowledge base, read books, navigate across the country, take photographs and movies, and play almost any song ever written, what do you think that person would say?

"No thanks." ?

The smartphone is one of the most significant inventions of the last 100 years.

View on HN

Smartphones are just portable computers. There is nothing new to them apart from the fact that 1) they have internet mobile connection 2) their form factor makes them very practical to carry.

Technology-wise, we already had about everything when we had laptops and modems attached to them. It's just become much more convenient but it's still the same concept.

Smartphones outsell computers 5 to 1 and for the next billion smartphone users a smartphone will be their first computer. Dismissing them as mere refinement of what went before is to ignore the scale of their impact on the world.

One may as well dismiss laptops with modems as "more fully featured telegraphs", or "smaller mainframes".

Exactly because the smartphone will be the first computer for the next billion users, the points made by the linked article are important.

That argument is not as relevant as evidence of the importance of the invention of the smartphone vs the laptop with a modem.

> Smartphones outsell computers 5 to 1 and for the next billion smartphone users a smartphone will be their first computer.

Nice strawman. This was not at all my point. It's not because something gets market recognition that it's fundamentally new in itself. Most of the time it's simply because the way it's packaged or marketed is more attractive.

> for the next billion smartphone users a smartphone will be their first computer.

Smartphones will be their first and last computer. Laptops, let alone desktops, are being permanently bypassed.

What defines the PC for ordinary consumers is not the big black box under the desk, though. It's the keyboard, the mouse, the displays.

The smartphone may replace the box, but it won't replace the peripherals. Those will continue to be extremely desireable features for many tasks, because they are far more ergonomic and speed up many types of work.

I predict a smartphone docking station on every desk within 5 years, both at home and at work. Maybe a docking station on every couch, too, tablet form-factor.

Well, no. There are lots of situation where a tiny screen and no keyboard is laughably insufficient.

>Smartphones will be their first and last computer

No, unfortunately smartphones are toys at best. Nobody uses them for real work, just consumption and browsing facebook. When they go to work, they will use a real computer.

That's just... not accurate. I know lots of people who do real work on smartphones. Hell, I'd be dead a few times by now if I didn't use mine as a radar HUD while photographing tornadoes. (While also using it to report digitally directly to the weather service, and running a GPS tracker so that they both can see me on a map and so that I later can geotag photos taken on cameras that don't have integrated gps). To say nothing of how much I use my phone to take photographic and text notes. Don't make the tremendous mistake of assuming that just because you can't find a use for a smartphone in your line of work that nobody else can or does.

I use my iPhone to collect data for OpenStreetMap. If you ever find yourself in London using an OSM-based map, some chunk of it will likely have been created using my pointless silly Facebook twit-machine.

Computers are just really fast calculators. Calculators are just weird abaci made out of sand. Modems are just phones for computers. Phones are just smoke signals through a wire. By reducing things to their absolute basics, it's easy to lose track of the fact that reductions in size or increases in speed are sometimes the driving force of progress, far more than the original concept ever was.

> Computers are just really fast calculators.

In what way is a Universal Turing Machine equivalent, stored-program, probably Von Neumann architecture computer in any way "really just" a fast calculator? The computer may contain an ALU, but the ability to change the program makes the computer capable of far more that a fancy ALU (calculator).

There are a lot of people that wish they could stuff the genie called "Turing complete" back in its bottle and go back to the days of selling merely a calculator (or "app"liance), but as Cory Doctorow put it[1], "...an appliance is not a stripped-down computer -- it is a fully functional computer with spyware on it out of the box."

[1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HUEvRyemKSg

When computers first became a thing, that's what people thought of them as. Many did not see their potential outside of raw number crunching. ordinary's position, which I share, is that the "smartphones are just portable computers" sentiment is repeating this mistake.

They're used quite differently and that should be the characteristic defining them. A hairdryer and a car are both things built around a motor - yet they are hardly the same.

Lots of general purpose computing chips exist in all kind of devices, yet that doesn't make them computers. The great majority of people uses smartphones still mainly a communications device, just like they used phones before.

That's one way of looking at it. Smartphones are portable computers! is another way. The portability and usability changes everything.

It changes everything for consumers. I don't know about people around you, but around me 99% of people just use their smartphone to either 1) play such silly games that they make 80's Pacman look like a piece of Art, 2) use Facebook messaging/email 3) use it as a (poor) camera 4) consulting news/weather 5) use it as GPS for maps/directions.

I see about no productive work happening on smartphones. It's a leisure device at best, or something convenient, but not something that will ever replace a PC with a proper OS and full keyboard.

Sure, there will always be the 1% of folks who does something else with their smartphone, but that's a very, very small minority.

I see nothing wrong with having a consumer-mostly device in my pocket. In fact, I see a lot right with it, as I can use it to communicate with everyone I know in a variety of ways, navigate anywhere I want, and look up whatever information I need just about anywhere.

I don't understand when developers feel threatened by the existence of consumer devices.

Convenience is an incredibly powerful feature.

We had it several years before the smartphone boom. Just a dumb phone that could talk Bluetooth (DUN profile anyone? or PAN), and a palmtop/handheld device that could talk Bluetooth (again, DUN or PAN).

You convieniently didnt mention that it also allows their government to know where they are and where they were and what they're saying and what they've said, and what they're reading, and glimpses of what they've seen, forever.

Everyone knows this already and most happily make the trade-off. My gov knows exactly what and when I do something in public, and probably on my phone/desktop. Do I have things to hide? Sure. And I take the proper precautions to ensure its safety because I know the trade I made. Plenty of govs still police your speech, enjoy that ours only hears but does not act.

That's a government problem, not a smart phone problem.

As developers shouldn't we view it as a smart phone problem? When trying to reach Poitras and Greenwald Snowden turned to a technical solution, encryption, for what is a government problem, spying on private communications. Using a VPN to bypass the Great Firewall is certainly easier than tearing it down. A VPN isn't a permanent solution, you can see we play a cat and mouse game with the GFW, but we should use our talents in the most effective way possible. Whether or not developing technical solutions to government problems is the best use of our skills I do not know.

Meh, at some point we've gotta see this as a trade off. And do you know something, I'm really not that concerned that .gov knows my browsing history.

>"No thanks." ?

If you then showed them a real computer, nobody in their right mind would have said "yes." The thing about smartphones is, they don't actually do anything new. The only thing better about them is the form factor, they sacrifice everything else in comparison to a real computer. None of those things you listed are inherent to smartphones.

>The smartphone is one of the most significant inventions of the last 100 years.

This is hilarious. Oh yeah sure, nukes are pretty forgettable compared to smartphones, because now anyone can post on Hacker News from while on the toilet.

> Oh yeah sure, nukes are pretty forgettable

Stop trolling. GP said "one of the most".

Do you think he would trade that for a horse?

Ah, but you didn't mention the most egregious aspect of a smart phone - a device that they could put in their pocket that would let nearly anyone on the planet instantly communicate with them.

That is one Hell of a lot of people I have no interest in talking to.

So what? Don't answer. Set up VIP email lists, or SMS. The tool isn't the problem, it's how you use it. I get more email that I don't care about than I do care, so I don't let email distract me, in that I silence it's notifications. But that isn't enough to keep a smartphone out of my pocket.

Email has the advantage of white lists. Until phones have the same you'll always be looking at a ringing phone trying to decide if it's a call you want to take - in of itself annoying and time-wasting.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com